And you thought Aditya Chopra is a filmmaker!
A baker’s dozen of management mantras from a management guru in disguise.
The recent hype around The Romantics on Netflix took me back in time to an unforgettable evening I was fortunate to have spent listening to Aditya Chopra. For those still in the dark, The Romantics is a short documentary series that celebrates the films of Yash Chopra and Yash Raj Films (YRF), the impact they have had not just through the stories they told but also the impact they have had in making the Hindi film industry a global force to reckon with. The documentary briefly touches upon the famed reclusiveness of Aditya Chopra and how he has achieved mythic levels of invisibility while being one of the most, if not the most, powerful men in an industry that thrives on visibility through any and every means possible.
The unforgettable evening I mentioned in my opening line was during my stint with MTV in 2005-06. Late 2005, a couple of months into being part of the madness and chaos that was MTV, I was asked if I would be interested in being a part of a chat session with Aditya Chopra. Many of those reading this might not know that I used to be known by the First Day Third Show moniker in my first place of work. Thanks to a dear friend who was/still is a Hindi films fanatic, his enthusiasm and passion for watching Hindi films on the first day of release rubbed on to a few of us. Why first day? Because in those days, reviews of movies would be published in newspapers on a Saturday or a Sunday. And we didn’t want our opinion of a movie to be coloured by reading the review. We wanted to be the ones who told others whether their 3 hours were worth spending inside a theatre. That’s also where the habit of the short reviews comes from. Anyway … coming back to the question I was posed with – whether I would be interested in being part of a chat session with Aditya Chopra? I mean, was that even a question? I grabbed the opportunity with both hands, legs, torso, neck … you get the drift.
I had written a transcript of sorts post the session. Time, age, the benefit of perspective that comes with experience and, last but not the least, the pressure to make my fortnightly posts engaging have resulted in me tinkering around with the way I have edited and structured it now. The more I think about it, the more I feel it was a masterclass from a management guru. And there were thirteen lessons in management that I could cull out of my transcript. One thing I can assure you is that none of what has been written has been influenced by The Romantics. Read on …
… and while doing so read it through the lens that this was something I heard 18 years ago. You will realise how far ahead in the game YRF was, thanks to Aditya Chopra.
I had just joined MTV and our Head of Creative & Content (C&C) had managed to get one valuable hour from Aditya Chopra to generally have a chat with some of us, just like that. So I trooped along with about 15 other colleagues and went to the famed YRF Studios on Andheri Link road. We reached there at about 5.45 pm for a 6 pm appointment. Why do I specify that? Because we were specifically told to reach at least 15 minutes early. I had shot a ‘how-the-f***-does-it-matter-if-one-is-a-little-delayed-to-meet-a-film-studio-head?’ kind of questioning look towards our C&C head when I heard this. Believe you me, this didn’t come from any arrogance or any condescending attitude towards meetings and reaching them on time. It’s the just the way things have been always been this side of the world. In a country where the most professional of corporate types struggle to be punctual even for important business meetings, how much would it matter if one reached late for a tete-a-tete with a studio head? After all, the punctuality credentials of the Hindi film industry were well known. Little did I know then that I was in for an evening full of surprises.
Surprise No. 1 – all our names were given to the security guys at the main gate. It was a breeze walking in. Surprise because they were expecting us. Normally one would associate unorganized-ness from a Bollywood studio. This was like entering a corporate office for a scheduled meeting appointment.
Surprise No. 2 – the studio itself. It’s f*****g massive. (Those of you have watched The Romantics will attest to this.) Thanks to being on shoots for ad films on my businesses, I had gotten used to shooting at studios which are, typically, these massive floors where you shoot, where there is a small area that is cordoned off to set up the snacks and lunch counters, where vanity vans act as green rooms and make up rooms. But this … this was different. YRF Studios can pass off as a commercial complex that houses some of the top corporates of the country. It is something that was a first for its day.
It is an all-in-one studio. So now Yash Raj doesn’t need to depend on the vagaries of other studios for recording, dubbing, shooting, equipment, etc. They do it all in-house. In an era of outsourcing, this was a unique case of integration. Apparently several hundred crores have been spent in putting it together. It is state-of-the-art. It has massive floors. It has well-appointed green rooms. From what one gets to hear, no vanity vans are allowed inside the premises. However big a star you may be, you leave your stardom and all its attendant vanities at the gates of YRF Studios.
Surprise No. 3 – we were ushered to a waiting hall that had been booked for us. Ushering us, while professional, also ensured that no one strayed into other parts of the premises. It has an air of secrecy surrounding it since not only ideas are thrown about in various corridors, but even stars, generally hang around safe in the knowledge that there will not be any intrusion from unwanted guests. No sooner than we had settled down that water arrived – half the tray with chilled water, the other half with room temperature water. An attendant moved around asking us our tea/coffee preferences, which he noted on a pad. Thorough attentiveness and leaving nothing to chance is the mantra everyone follows.
Surprise No. 4 – Aditya Chopra walks in on the dot at 6 pm. Like any corporate professional should, but rarely does.
Before Adi walked in … (I will mention him as Adi for convenience’s sake and not out of wanting to show off my (non-existent) familiarity with him) … we were specifically told not to ask any personal questions (rumours were swirling about his marriage being on the rocks and his rumoured dalliance with Rani Mukherjee). That’s it. The session was meant to be a freewheeling one around Adi’s approach to movies, his learnings, his mistakes, his inspirations, etc
Establishing Adi’s credentials
Thanks to The Romantics, everyone now knows of Adi’s legendary reclusiveness. He is the least photographed person in the film industry. Considering that he is like that even with those from within his industry, he actually didn’t need to even meet us since neither were we script writers, nor were we directors, and nor were we actors. But meet us he did. And in the process left us mesmerised.
You've probably heard of the 10,000 hour rule, which was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell's blockbuster book “Outliers.” As Gladwell tells it, the rule goes like this: it takes 10,000 hours of intensive practice to achieve mastery of complex skills and materials, like playing the violin or getting as good as Bill Gates. Growing up surrounded by films and filmy folk, being on sets since childhood, and of course watching films for a living, has been Adi’s 10,000 hours of training. Legend goes that when Adi wasn’t this hot shot director or producer, long before, and even after, Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (DDLJ) happened, he used to go to watch movies at the theatre like any other regular guy. (Being reclusive does have its advantages of not being mobbed.) And he would predict the collections of the movie. This is important because we are used to generally saying Flop, Hit or Super Hit. Adi predicted collections – not just overall, but by territories. He used to make a note of it in little notebooks that he had. And he had a strike rate of more than 90% accuracy in his predictions!!!
Adi & the Blink factor
“Blink - The Power Of Thinking Without Thinking”, once again by Malcolm Gladwell, explains how humans can use tiny pieces of information, previous experience and knowledge in order to make amazingly quick and right decisions without scrupulous analysis. And how these decisions can be as good or even better than well-deliberated ones. It is basically about how one can train one’s gut feel. And nowhere was it more evident than it was in Adi. He knows what will work, what will not work. Without any formal research. He has trained his instincts and he places huge bets on them. Two examples:
Mujhse Dosti Karoge (MDK): he knew something was amiss in that movie, but yet he went ahead with producing it because all the powers-that-be told him that it was a sure shot hit – it had Hrithik (who at that time could do no wrong), Rani and Kareena. The movie flopped. And Adi was frank enough to admit that he had made a mistake by listening to others. But he said that it was good that the movie flopped because it only made him believe in his own convictions and instincts (In The Romantics, he says 'it’s the best thing to have happened to him.’). He said that if the movie had become a hit then he wouldn’t have got the confidence to trust himself and his instincts. He would have always ended up listening to others.
Kajra Re: When the soundtrack of Bunty Aur Babli was ready, the staff of YRF was given a copy to listen and give their opinions. Questionnaires were distributed and were asked to be filled up. The unanimous verdict was that the soundtrack was brilliant, except for one song – Kajra Re. It was panned by all staff, across the board. Everyone told Adi that it had to be dropped. But thanks to his prior experience of MDK, he decided to ignore everyone and insisted that the track be there. The rest is history.
How Adi captured the zeitgeist
The early 90’s saw tremendous changes in India and how Indians lived. The economic reforms brought on by Dr. Manmohan Singh were a version of Mark Zuckerberg’s motto of ‘Move fast and break things’. The country was opening up at warp speed. Travel became easier. Our exposure to global concepts increased manifold. And middle class and upper middle class Indians soaked all of these in like sponges. Likewise the Indian diaspora which was seen as some distant entity also started making their presence felt in their homeland.
Till DDLJ happened, everyone used to just talk about how the Indian diaspora was famished for entertainment, how they would always look towards India for their cultural leanings, how they preserved their culture in spite of three generations staying abroad, etc. Adi put all this knowledge to good use when it came to DDLJ. He put the math in place of the sheer numbers that represented India abroad, along with the softer, emotional aspect of their longing for all things Indian. Thus, was born a love story that straddled the East and West, not just in terms of geographies, but also in terms of values and culture. DDLJ was the first major overseas hit. It touched a nerve in the diaspora without ever alienating the Indian audience. It was the first such movie made with the explicit aim of addressing overseas audiences to garner box office collections. Till then the overseas audiences were not seen as a collective. DDLJ truly opened up the potential the overseas markets held for Hindi movies. This was made possible by the sharp business mind that Adi had working behind the creative front. While watching the movie then, and even today, you just feel that it wasn’t just a movie. It was more like an idea whose time had come. Little did one know that what is essentially a love story had so much thinking going behind its making. It had all things going for it – right time, right place, right story, right stars.
A trivia about DDLJ that Adi told us – Yash Chopra, after reading the script, told Adi not to go ahead with the project. He said that it would not work. But Adi said that he had this fire burning in him to make the movie. So he spoke to his mom, narrated the script and told her of the most poignant scene – when Simran (Kajol) asks Raj (SRK) to elope and Raj tells her that he wouldn’t elope but would woo her father so that he would willingly give her hand to him. Adi says that after hearing this his mom said, ‘Beta this is different. I think it is a new thought.’ That’s it, this was enough motivation for Adi to go ahead and make the movie the way he wanted it.
Adi & the economics of making a movie
This is roughly how Adi goes about producing a movie. He gets a script. If it interests him, he goes ahead and produces it. But there is a lot that goes into the process after he gets interested. He figures out what kind of an audience would be interested in watching a movie like this. He calls them his core audience. He then goes about figuring out how many of these individuals are there in the population of India and abroad. He then takes a minimum percentage of that number – that being the audience who will go and definitely see the movie. He figures out the spill over audience. He considers that a bonus, and doesn’t entirely depend on them to give him returns. He then sees if there is any scope of getting another chunk of an audience by modifying some elements in the script (more on that shortly). He also falls refers to his data of past movies on similar themes and how their business had fared (remember the small diaries with the territory wise collections?). After all of this is done, he then goes about figuring out what kind of returns he can expect. Once that figure is arrived at, he deducts the marketing costs, the publicity costs, the print costs, etc and arrives at a figure. Then he keeps aside his margin. The final figure that he arrives at then becomes the budget of his movie. And then he goes about fitting everything else within that budget. This includes the star cast, the crew, the music director, the locations, technicians, etc. And then he sticks by this budget. He does that for every movie. So from the moment the film goes on the floors, he is assured of breaking even and making a small profit. If a slightly greater percentage of people watch the movie than what he had expected, the movie becomes a hit. And if the movie attracts a wider audience, then it becomes a blockbuster, like Hum Tum. But he never starts off a movie thinking that it will become a blockbuster. And that so-and-so and so-and-so will be the stars who will star in it. The best stars that will fit into the budget will be the ones that he will go after.
How Adi experiments to get a wider audience
Adi gave an example of how he went about adding layers of audiences while producing Hum Tum. What was essentially a youth romcom became a romantic family entertainer. It was felt that the storyline of the movie offered possibilities to increase its viewing audience to include kids. So along with the teasers, some of the promos of Hum Tum started with cartoon renditions of the lead cast of Saif Ali Khan and Rani Mukherjee.
These then got converted into stickers, book covers, comic strips, etc… essentially movie merchandise. Normally this happens after a movie is released. But Adi wanted some amount of pester power in attracting audiences beforehand. These were done to attract kids to theatres. And kids never come alone. So though the core target audience for Hum Tum was the youth / young adults, families ended up coming due to pester power. As a result, the content of the movie also had to be modified a bit so that it didn’t offend the family and kids. There were snappy dialogues, jokes, humour, and all the elements that any middle-aged guy / woman would find interesting as they represented their youthful days of yore. The kids would have something new, something a little youthful, not kiddish, to learn to show off to their peers. Specifically, one scene was crafted keeping in mind that kids would be watching the movie - the scene where Saif gets drunk and ends up having sex with Rani. For that scene, according to Adi, it was necessary to get Saif drunk. So that when a kid was watching the movie, and when s/he saw Rani crying the next morning, and when s/he asked her/his pop/mum ‘why did Saif hurt Rani?’, their folks would be able to justify it by saying that it happened because Saif was drunk. And which is why drinking is bad. The kid would be satisfied and the folks would be relieved of the task of uncomfortable questions. When asked if he actually thought about this that far ahead, Adi very matter-of-factly said yes … it is his job to think of all these things! One could actually detect a little surprise when he was asked this question. To him it was a very obvious thing, to think holistically.
Adi’s take on songs & naming & look of a movie
Songs are essential breaks in the story. But for Adi, it doesn’t begin and end there. He goes deep into what the lyrics of the song would possibly be. That is how he briefs his lyricists. For Kajra Re, it was essential to have flowery Hindi words interspersed with some basic English words. Why? Because the setting of the movie was in small town Uttar Pradesh (U.P.), where they still take pride in their language and its purity, but at the same time they cannot do without English. Hence words like ‘personal se sawaal karti hai’ were essential. And Kajra Re had a good mix of both.
On the other hand for Dhoom, the lyrics of Dhoom Macha Le demanded flippancy. It was a slick movie. So the song had to be slick. And catchy. And international. So he got Tata Young to sing a version as well in English. Furthermore on Kajra Re, it was also recorded with a remix version. Why? Because Adi knew that the song would be a hit and all hit songs end up in night clubs. So he made sure that a remix version was done at the very beginning and kept ready. When the movie’s soundtrack took off (as expected), a month after that he brought out the remix version. And even that took off.
Even the title of a movie has a lot of thought behind it. Adi mentioned that Bunty Aur Babli was named as Bunty Aur Babli and not Bunty & Babli. Simply because it was set in a rural North India setting. The title had to have a Hindi element, considering that both the names are actually English. Even Babli had to be spelt as Babli and not Bubbly. For Neal N’ Niki, the N was essential as this was a movie that was going to speak to the urban audiences which was the core target audience for it. It had to have an urban feel. It simply couldn’t be Neal Aur Niki! And Neal & Niki wasn’t as cool. The youth like Americanised versions of words. So ‘and / &’ became ‘N’. Neal too had to be spelt with an ‘a’ and not two ‘e’s’. This same thought process gets translated into the branding elements, the logo of the movie, the look and feel, etc. Which is why the fonts, design elements, colour palette, photography style, etc of the two movies leave no doubt as to who the core audiences for the two movies are. (Yes, Neal N’ Niki left a lot to be desired in terms of content, but then every successful corporate has its shares of damp squibs.)
Adi and conviction
As mentioned earlier, Adi says that it’s all about conviction. Conviction in his script made him go ahead and make DDLJ & Mohabbatein. Lack of conviction saw him go through a flop like Mujhse Dosti Karoge. And he says that conviction is what a director should have. And that is what he looks at when he is evaluating a script. So even though Kunal Kohli had given a flop like MDK, he was completely convinced about it and hence Adi decided to bankroll it. And when Kohli again approached YRF to produce Hum Tum, it was the same conviction that Adi backed (of course he made modifications to the script as mentioned earlier to ensure that no stone was left unturned). He also said that he makes sure that all the noughts and crosses are tied down before going to the floors. All discussions, inputs, suggestions, changes are discussed and finalised prior to greenlighting a project. After that he doesn’t interfere in the making of the movie. He leaves that to the conviction of the director and his team. He believes in personally owning up if the product is a failure, but makes sure that it’s the team that basks in the glory when it is a success.
Adi’s favourite movie
Adi claims that he must have seen Amar Akbar Anthony more than a 1000 times. He is just amazed by it. In awe of it. And to go back to the point of conviction, he says that it comes through how convinced Manmohan Desai must have been with all the diverse elements and situations he had concocted while making the movie. What Adi said is so true - it is just impossible to narrate the storyline of the movie in a linear fashion to anyone. How else, Adi surmised, can one imagine pulling off a scene where a visually challenged Bharati (Nirupa Roy) while stumbling into a Sai Baba temple in some godforsaken place gets back her eyesight in the form of two flames flying out from the Baba’s eyes … while Akbar (Rishi Kapoor) is singing a qawwali in the temple … and Robert (Jeevan) and Ranjeet (Ranjeet) are in hot pursuit to kidnap her … only to be stopped by a cobra that comes down the temple wall and stops their advance! Phew! And the best part is that when one is watching the movie, the audience doesn’t snigger at the banality of this scene simply because they have been engulfed by Manmohan Desai’s passion, vision and conviction.
Spot Quiz: What role does Neetu Singh play in the movie? (Answer in the link above.)
To conclude, Surprise No. 5 – Adi left along with us. He moves around in an Audi sedan, not the industry’s favourite look-at-me monster, aka the Lexus LX450 SUV (obviously mobility preferences of the film industry have changed a lot over the last 18 years). And he sits next to the chauffer. I think it speaks volumes about the character of a guy who has been brought up with the proverbial silver spoon, who has always been rich, has always grown up with other filmi types … and in spite of that has remained unaffected by the trappings of stratospheric levels of glamour and success.
While we had been told that he has only 1 hour, our session went on for close to 4 hours. That glitch of some staff member not checking the clock to remind Adi that he was going wayyy over time was the only “non-professional” thing about the evening. Obviously no one from our side was checking our watches either. Why would anyone do that when you are getting to spend the most enriching 4 hours in the company of an undisputed master of the game!
Be braver. Be kinder.
A 4-part documentary that tracks the journey and legacy of the Chopra’s - first led by Yash Chopra who hands over the baton to Aditya Chopra, who then ably takes it forward. It is essentially about Adi’s vision of transforming Yash Raj Films from a mere successful production house to a behemoth studio that it is today. It is also about how the family lives, eats, breathes, walks, sleeps … films. It is about the deep understanding of the Indian audiences - here as well as overseas - coupled with a sharp sense of business that has helped it withstand the misfired advent of American studios, and come out on tops. It is also about getting a first hand understanding of the myth called Adi Chopra. It has got the who’s who of the Indian film industry gushing about working with the Chopra’s. Overall a good watch to get a good sense of the sway that one family has held over 5-plus decades by continually staying ahead of the curve - be it in storytelling or in monetising potential to the max.
The Romantics | Netflix | Documentary | 4 episodes
This is brilliantly written, Shantanu! Loved reading this one :)
It almost seemed like a documentary in itself with so much to imbibe & learn with some amazing leadership values, and management mantras as you rightly said.
This is so well written that it captures one’s mind out of intrigue, to want to read more. I just finished watching the Romantics and finally read this article! It’s like butter to bread! An absolute delight to read with jaw opening instances and lessons. Inspiring work!! Aditya Chopra is a genius, and your words are magic! This is great!